50 years later, assassination still haunts us

Capital Region residents reflect on a shared sense of loss after Nov. 22, 1963, killing of John F. Kennedy

By Amy Biancolli

Updated 9:29 pm, Saturday, November 16, 2013

Photo: Uncredited

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FILE - In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, arrive at Love Field airport in Dallas, as a television camera, above, follows them. More than a dozen new documentary and information specials are among the crop of TV commemorations pegged to this half-century mark of a weekend when, as viewers will be reminded again and again, everything changed. (AP Photo/File) ORG XMIT: NYET405 less

FILE - In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, arrive at Love Field airport in Dallas, as a television camera, above, follows them. More than a dozen new ... more

Photo: Uncredited

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Frank LaPosta Visco (Gary Gold)

Frank LaPosta Visco (Gary Gold)

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Barbara Neiman

Barbara Neiman

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Carl Bon Tempo

Carl Bon Tempo

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Carl Bon Tempo

Carl Bon Tempo

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Ekaterina Haskins

Ekaterina Haskins

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Jack Gordon

Jack Gordon

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Richard Drew

Richard Drew

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50 years later, assassination still haunts us

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Around lunchtime on a brilliant fall day, bullets fired on the streets of Dallas ripped into John F. Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally as they rode in an open car with the president's wife, Jacqueline.

Fifty years later, Americans are still talking about the events of that day, Nov. 22, 1963, describing them, documenting them, debating them. And remembering them: Reinforced through years of retelling and reflection, the first national tragedy of the television era left a sense of collective grief that, for many people, remains undiluted five decades later.

"We all remember it together," said Jack Gordon, a 1968 graduate of Albany Academy. "We walk down the corridors of the school. We all point to the room where we were in study hall when the word started to come out. And then we were all assembled in the auditorium — it was called the chapel in those days — and the headmaster came in."

A lecturer and frequent consultant on the assassination (who maintains shots were fired from two directions), Gordon is set to deliver a talk on JFK at his alma mater at 8:30 a.m. Friday, the anniversary of the president's assassination. On that long-ago afternoon, he said, they sat and watched the news reports. "And we were just glued to the television set for the rest of the weekend."

That expression — "glued to the television" — popped up repeatedly in more than 90 responses to a call for Kennedy-related memories that ran in the Times Union. After hearing the news, Americans parked themselves in front of the nearest TV and stayed there for hours that turned into days. They were glued to it still on Nov. 24, 1963, when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, on his march to the county jail.

Most everyone wrote of the heaviness of the mood, the silence on the streets. It was sunny in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot and died, but in Albany the skies were overcast. Some who first heard reports took it for a joke, and a bad one. Many who wrote recalled hearing the news in school — through a honking public-address system or, more intimately, in the words of a teacher who entered a classroom weeping. Catholic school graduates described the strangeness of watching a nun cry. Others told of seeing their stolid fathers and macho co-workers collapse in tears. Grief was immediate, personal, profound: As Troy's Frank LaPosta Visco observed, "It felt as though hope was lost."

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Most headed home. Many flocked to church. Some were caught in transit. Barbara Scheer Neiman of Schodack first heard of the shooting as a 12-year-old at Albany's William S. Hackett Junior High School. Later, her mother was driving her to a doctor's appointment on Western Avenue when the news turned even darker.

"I'm pretty sure that most people who were driving also had their radios on because, almost instantly, traffic stopped," she recalled. "People, including my mother, pulled over and were either crying or just too distraught to continue. The memory of watching traffic on Western Avenue come to a sudden and complete halt is as real to me now as it was at that time."

Working at WPTR, a rock 'n' roll radio station on Central Avenue, Visco ran out and bought a recording of a requiem to play on the air. "It really was the day our music stopped," he commented. "Pop music and commercials ceased on every wavelength that day."

He described seeing the young Senator Kennedy on a campaign swing through Manhattan in October 1960. The honeymooning Visco and his wife were leaving their hotel by a side door, and there he was: "He actually stood up on a car and made a little impromptu speech with the people that gathered around him. ... There was a lot of hope for a young president and young people, in those days. That's what made the assassination even more tragic."

So many of these memories, distilled to their essence through time and emotion, come down to a shared sense of loss: the loss of a president; the loss of "Camelot" and its fairy-tale family, the regal Jackie, the adorable John and Caroline; the loss of hope, youth, innocence.

All three words of those words showed up in letters these past weeks, the last one most of all.

"It was truly the end of innocence in the U.S.," wrote Marjorie P. Morelli, who happened to flip on a radio for a ninth grade Lansingburgh science lesson only to hear an announcement of the attack in Dallas. "It was 50 years ago, (but) the memories are as vivid as if it were last week."

Many compared the impact to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the defining national tragedy of the radio era. Americans lost their innocence then, just as they lost it, years later, on Sept. 11, 2001. "Are we always losing our innocence?" Gordon pondered. Tough question. But he's convinced that, had Kennedy lived, the president's push for "peace in all time" might have had a fighting chance. "And then I don't think we would be talking about loss of innocence," he said.

More tragedy followed in the years after Kennedy's assassination: Vietnam, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the 1968 riots. "In some ways, the Kennedy assassination is part of the arc of what we might call the 1960s," said University at Albany historian Carl Bon Tempo. "I wonder to myself, 'What if the Kennedy assassination was the only assassination of the 1960s? In other words, what if MLK isn't assassinated five years later? What if Robert Kennedy isn't assassinated five years later? What if Kent State, which is a different type of violence — but it is political violence — what if that doesn't happen?"

But all those things did happen. "And the assassination becomes symbolic of the era," he said, "because we know what happens afterward."

Peg Button, now of Altamont, was a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1963. When she was a child, her father was a groundsman at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod: She met Bobby, who was "kind of a nerd." And Jack, who was "awesome, gorgeous. ... He was the star of the family."

Remembering is painful. "When I still think about it, I still mourn," said Button. "You know?"

Beyond the assassination itself, readers shared the same enduring afterimages: Jackie in her bloodied pink suit. Walter Cronkite, overcome, announcing Kennedy's death. John-John's salute at his father's casket. Blackjack, the riderless horse with the rear-facing boots in the stirrups. These snapshots of national grief haunt Americans still, even those who didn't live in the 60s.

"You know, they take on a life of their own, in a way," said Ekaterina Haskins, an expert on public memory and national identity who teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Certain images of Kennedy and of course the Kennedy funeral become iconic in the public's eyes."

Kennedy's death is so densely fogged with memory and meaning that the "naked event" can no longer be viewed on its own. "There's an incredible power of visual memory to shape our collective memory," she said, noting that anniversaries, movies, media reports and conspiracy theories only add more layers to the national psyche.

Memory is complicated. "Yes. It's complicated, it's malleable, and it's also contested," Haskins said. "There's no end to it."

For those who saw JFK in Texas on the day he died, the mind's eye is as sharp as ever. Richard Drew of Delmar, who was working in Dallas at the time, recalled lining up on the street with his wife, his cousin and her little boy to watch the motorcade. "Kennedy passed probably within 10 feet — no bubble on the car, of course. And Jackie had her pink suit, and he was smiling." Maybe half an hour later, he was back at work. "And the next thing I know, people were screaming and yelling."

Shannon Hickman of Guilderland was a 9-year-old shopping for hats in a Fort Worth department store when she and her family went out to glimpse the car carrying JFK, Jackie and Connally to the airfield for their flight to Dallas. She, too, remembers the first lady's outfit — "how beautiful she was."

Hickman regards the president's death as a personal and national trauma. "For me it was the first time that somebody had died. But I think it was the first time that the country as a whole felt vulnerable — the president had been murdered."

President Kennedy wasn't perfect, many stressed. One criticized his handling of foreign affairs and the Bay of Pigs invasion; others mentioned his reported extramarital affairs.

Bon Tempo, for one, wonders about the urge to characterize the assassination and aftermath as a turning point. And he rebuts the idea that America, with its history of slavery, could ever profess innocence. Instead, he regards the 35th president as a man interrupted. Kennedy had only just changed his view on civil rights legislation, only just started to roll up his sleeves on the hard political work it would require. And then, Vietnam: In November of '63, he was in the midst of puzzling out his options.

"His life is cut short at that moment when on the major issues of the day he's still figuring out what direction he wants to take the country in — and how he's going to get the country there," Bon Tempo said. "So it's a presidency unfulfilled."

Others expressed sad if-onlys. "What would have happened if he was alive?" asked Drew. "Where would he have gone?"

Or as Tom McCarthy of Clifton Park wrote: "To this day, I can never see a picture of Jack Kennedy without thinking of what might have been."